Jean Delville

Jean Delville was a Belgian symbolist painter, author, poet, polemicist, teacher, and Theosophist. Delville was the leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist movement in art during the 1890s. He held, throughout his life, the belief that art should be the expression of a higher spiritual truth and that it should be based on the principle of Ideal, or spiritual Beauty. He executed a great number of paintings during his active career from 1887 to the end of the second World War expressing his Idealist aesthetic. Delville was trained at the Acadmie des Beauxarts in Brussels and proved to be a highly precocious student, winning most of the prestigious competition prizes at the Academy while still a young student. He later won the Belgian Prix de Rome which allowed him to travel to Rome and Florence and study at first hand the works of the artists of the Renaissance. During his time in Italy he created his celebrated masterpiece LEcole de Platon , which stands as a visual summary of his Id

Delville was born onJanuary 1867 at 2.00 a.m., rue des Dominicains in Louvain. He was born illegitimate into a working class household. His mother was Barbe Libert , the daughter of a canal worker who earned a living as a journalire as an adult. Delville never knew his father Joachim Thibault who was a lecturer in Latin and Greek at a local college and who came from a bourgeoisie family. He bore his mothers name until she married a functionary working in Louvain, Victor Delville . Victor adopted Jean who, until then, was known as Jean Libert. The family moved to Brussels in 1870 and settled in Boulevard Waterloo near Porte de Hal. The Delville family later moved to St Gilles where Delville began his schooling at the Ecole Communale in rue du Fort. Delville took an early interest in drawing, even though his initial career ambitions were to become a Doctor. He was introduced to the artist Stivenart by his adoptive grandfather, Franois Delville, while still a young boy. Delville recal

Source: Wikipedia